South Africa makes world-class winemakers. Our cellars are filled with passionate artisans who spend years mastering fermentation, soil chemistry, and sensory analysis. But does the country make world-class wine businesses?
A winemaker can spend decades perfecting the liquid inside the bottle, only to open a business and discover that nobody taught them how to read a balance sheet, build a luxury brand, or have a meaningful conversation with their marketing team. While we have perfected the craft, the more challenging question is whether we are building the commercial ecosystems needed to sustain that excellence in a hyper-competitive global market.
The Cost of Siloed Thinking
In many local wine operations, those who make the product and those who sell it exist in entirely separate worlds.
“Winemakers will very rarely have a conversation with the marketing team or with the finance team,” explains Jonathan Steyn, convenor of the Wine Business Management programme at the UCT Graduate School of Business. “You have the siloing of information, and if you have a siloing of information, it stops innovation.”
For the consumer, this disconnect is felt immediately. We do not experience wine in corporate silos; we experience a unified brand story. When the cellar and the marketing office are not talking, the message falters. We learn to maximize chemical quality, but fail to translate that quality into real, perceived value in a buyer’s mind.
Narrative as the Ultimate Value Creator
The world’s most legendary wine regions did not build their reputations on liquid quality alone. Champagne, Napa Valley, and Tuscany built deliberate, highly structured ecosystems of narrative, lifestyle, and global positioning. They sold an aspirational dream first, and the vintage second.
South Africa has the product, but we have historically lacked the commercial ambition to match. Because traditional winemaking curricula rarely touch on narrative-building, the private sector is stepping up to lead.
As one of the country’s leading wine distributors and brand builders, Vinimark has begun hosting monthly masterclasses specifically designed to bridge the gap between production and the consumer. A recent session led by Vinimark’s Wine Training and Education Manager, Ginette de Fleuriot, titled “Tell Your Story,” focused on exactly this: how narrative directly shapes consumer perception, desire, and purchasing behavior.
Craft or Commerce: A False Dichotomy
Fortunately, the tide is turning. Cathy Marston, founder of the International Wine Education Centre (IWEC), notes that global qualifications like the WSET are increasingly being used by South Africans as passports to international wine careers. This growing global representation is crucial for elevating the image of South African wine abroad.
Meanwhile, academic programs are evolving. At UCT’s Graduate School of Business, the Business of Wine course intentionally groups winemakers, sommeliers, journalists, and marketers together. Their task? To develop a single product and speak with a single, unified voice.
Ultimately, the future of the industry does not require every winemaker to become a corporate marketer. It simply requires enough commercial literacy to collaborate. Craft and commerce are not opposing forces—they are the two essential ingredients of the very same product. The producers who treat them as inseparable are the ones who will define the future of South African luxury.
